Best of Sysadmin — October 2025

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   Article

   Hacker News·33w

   The Email They Shouldn't Have Read

   A system administrator shares a cautionary tale about migrating public institutions from Exchange to an open-source email stack. After successfully deploying the solution, multiple agencies attempted to leave their expensive managed service provider. The vendor retaliated by exploiting hidden contract clauses, potentially accessing client emails to sabotage migrations, and threatening legal action. Despite being open-source software, the provider claimed exclusive installation rights and increased costs by 30% for agencies trapped in contracts. The story illustrates how predatory business practices and vendor lock-in can corrupt even open-source solutions.

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2. 2
   Article

   omg! ubuntu!·31w

   Dracut in Ubuntu 25.10: What it is and Why it Matters (or Doesn’t)

   Ubuntu 25.10 replaces initramfs-tools with Dracut for generating the initramfs boot image. Dracut is a modular, hardware-detection-based system that supports modern technologies like TPM2 and FIDO2, offering slightly faster boot times and better maintainability. The change only affects fresh installs, not upgrades, and remains invisible to most users. While technically significant for the distribution's infrastructure, it requires no action from typical users unless they've customized initramfs hooks.

   23
3. 3
   Article

   Hacker News·30w

   Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs!

   Scheduling cron jobs at 2:00 or 3:00 AM on Sunday mornings can cause problems during daylight saving time transitions. When DST begins or ends, jobs scheduled at these times may run multiple times per second or behave unpredictably. The issue stems from vixie-cron's handling of time changes, where jobs can execute approximately 60 times in a single minute. Solutions include avoiding these specific times, setting server timezone to UTC to eliminate DST changes entirely, or scheduling jobs at slightly different times like 2:59 or 3:01 AM.

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